Windows NT is increasingly penetrating legacy environments, thereby creating a need to integrate existing applications with new applications based upon Windows NT. Accordingly, the complexity of developing and managing applications in heterogeneous environments is greatly increased. Moreover, software system development is moving away from an application-centered view to one that is centered on business processes. The starting point is a set of business process models, and the applications are then developed from the models. The result is a need for a comprehensive set of tools to abstract existing legacy systems into business models, and then to generate applications from those models.
Business process models define business processes; and, business processes describe activities that need to be performed within an organization. Examples of such activities may include processing purchase orders, payroll processing, or processing insurance claims. Actual software applications may be derived from business processes. These software applications, in conjunction with other software systems and a team of humans, may accomplish a defined business process.
Creation of business applications results in the need for a comprehensive environment that will support the entire business application development process. The process may start with the building of business models and progress to representing the business models as a collection of object models. Object models are a means for describing interactions between functions that are amenable to being automated in a computer system, and which collectively represent the functionality necessary to implement a business model.
The next step may include creating source code for the functions defined in the object model (business logic); that is, the creation of methods for the business processes that represent details of how the business runs. For example, if the business process is the handling of purchase orders, one function in the business process may be approval. The approval process may be represented as one part of an object model. Further, one detail about how this function is accomplished may be that purchase orders over $1,000 must be approved by a manager. Computer source code may be developed to implement the steps necessary to route purchase orders over $1,000 to a manager for approval. The development process may then proceed to building and wrapping components (reusable pieces of code), building applications from the components, and installing the new applications and components into the appropriate environments.
The development process results in a further need to discover legacy systems; that is, existing applications, components, business processes, or other legacy systems that must be discovered and integrated into new business models, which may in turn generate new business applications. The incorporation of existing legacy items into new applications will help preserve investments made in creating the legacy systems. A tool for performing the discovery of legacy systems is an example of one of the software tools capable of being integrated with other tools by the method and system of the present invention.
Current technology does not adequately address the needs for integrating various tools for use in a single environment that would support the process from beginning to end. Another shortcoming of existing technology is the inability to discover and reconstruct existing legacy items and incorporate them into new applications. Although there are tools that allow transformation of some legacy items into certain kinds of object models, these tools do not utilize the models to generate business applications. Furthermore, these tools are limited in their ability to abstract an object model from an existing software implementation, and are also not generalized, meaning that they are able to transform only certain types of legacy items into object models.
A further shortcoming of the current technology is that tools are usually inextricably linked to specific middleware, requiring the pairing of a specific tool with a specific middleware, when creating business applications. As an example of this shortcoming, if one tool is used to develop the business process model, one might be bound in the selection of the same tool to create the application source code for the model. The lack of tool independence is mainly due to the inability to exchange information between tools.